Another view of Kensington rune stone

ANOTHER VIEW OF KENSINGTON
RUNESTONE

BY
RASMUS B. ANDERSON

Reprinted from the Wisconsin Magazine of History
Volume Til, Number 1, June, 1920

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ANOTHER VIEW OF KENSINGTON
RUNE STONE

BY

RASMUS B. ANDERSON

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Reprinted from the Wisconsin Magazine of History
Volume III, Number 4, June, 1920

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ANOTHER VIEW OF THE KENSINGTON RUNE

STONE

Rasmus B. Anderson

When the so-called Kensington Rune Stone in 1898 was
brought forth from its sleep beneath the roots of a tree on a
farm near Kensington, Minnesota, it produced but a slight
ripple of sensation. A photographic copy of the inscription
on this stone was sent to me and to others supposed to be
somewhat familiar with the runic alphabet and with Old
Norse history, for our opinion, and I think I may safely say
that we all agreed in declaring it to be a rather clumsy fraud.
As a result the matter received but little further attention,
and Mr. Olaf Ohman, on whose farm the stone was found,
converted it into a stepping-stone to his granary. In course
of time Mr. H. R. Holand, now of Ephraim, Wisconsin, hap-
pened to visit Mr. Ohman and got possession of the discarded
rune stone, and how he ever since has been exploiting it is
presumably well known to my readers. The inscription is a
fraud on the very face of it, and the proofs of this fact are
most abundant.

I do not at present care to enter into a detailed discussion
of all the evidence against the genuineness of this runic in-
scription. I will, however, mention three facts that seem to
me quite conclusive.

(1 ) The date at the end of the inscription is 1362. Now
it is a well-known fact that the runes were extensively used
in the north of Europe before the eleventh century, but with
the introduction of Christianity the people got ink, parch-
ment, and the Roman alphabet ; the runes very rapidly passed
into desuetude, and long before 1362 their use had been wholly
abandoned.

4 Rasmus B. Anderson

(2) In the very beginning of the inscription occurs the
word "opdliagelsef^erdh," and the word "opdagelse," which
means discovery, had not yet been incorporated into any
Scandinavian tongue.

(3) In the inscription we also find the word "rise," mean-
ing journey. The word "reisa" is found in the old Scandi-
navian languages, but there it invariably means to raise, to
erect: thus, in phrases stating that a son erects a memorial
stone on his father's grave. But "reisa," meaning a journey,
is a word of recent importation in Scandinavia.

If an inscription should be brought to the notice of the
public with a claim that it was say 200 years old and was found
to contain such words as automobile, telephone, bicycle, wire-
less, aeroplane, and so on ad libitum, the opinion of a learned
university professor would not be required to establish its
fraudulent origin.

Perhaps I ought to add that the fact that in the very first
line of the inscription eight of the supposed explorers are
described as Goths, that is, men from Sweden, is sufficient to
throw suspicion on its genuineness, for it is well known that
those who made voyages to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland, and
to the western islands, generally, came not from Sweden or
Denmark, but from Norway.

As is well known, Mr. Holand several years ago took this
rune stone to Europe and had it examined by experts in
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, but these all declared it to
be without any historical value.

And now I have a short story to tell my readers of an
incident that occurred to me ten years ago. I made a state-
ment of it in my paper Amerika at the time, but as the interest
in the Kensington stone was then generally on the wane, my
story did not attract as wide attention as I had hoped.

These are the facts:

In 1910, on invitation, I delivered at Stanley, in the north-
western part of North Dakota, an oration on the seventeenth

Another View of the Kensington Rune Stone 5

of May, Norway's Fourth of July. Stanley was then a vil-
lage of about one thousand inhabitants. The weather was
fine; the speaking and music were from a platform erected
in the middle of the main street; all business was suspended;
and a large number of people had come from the surrounding
country and from neighboring villages, so that I was favored
with a large audience. In the evening there was a dance in
a large hall over a corner drug store. I was asked to attend
this ball, but as I was to take an early morning train for
St. Paul, I decided to retire early at my hotel. But I stepped
into the drug store where ice cream, soda water, and cigars
were sold. On entering the drug store I heard a man making
a vigorous speech in praise of the orator of the day. He told
the people how that gentleman had been a professor at the
University of Wisconsin, how he had served a term as United
States minister to Denmark, how he had perpetrated book
after book extolling the culture of the Scandinavians, and in-
sisted that he was entitled to far more appreciation than was
generally accorded him. This advocate of mine was attired
in the clothes of a workingman, more or less covered with dry
mud, but his speech revealed a man of more than ordinary
culture. If he had been an Irishman I should have been sure
that he had kissed the Blarney Stone. He could quote
Swedish poetry and Latin and Greek phrases with absolute
accuracy. He was well up in literature, history, and philoso-
phy. I admired him, not because he had showered compli-
ments on me and handed me a cigar, but because he was a man
of wonderful intelligence and of thorough education, and stiU
did not feel above doing common work.

In addressing him I said, "Who in the world are you,
anyway?"

He told me that he was a Swede, that his name was
Andrew Anderson, that in his younger days he had been a
student at the celebrated University of Upsala, and that in
1882 he had quit the University, packed his books, and emi-

6 Rasmus B. Anderson

grated to America, settling in Hoffman, Minnesota, where
he now owned a valuable farm. He had for years worked on
Jim Hill's Great Northern Railroad and was now acciden-
tally at Stanley as foreman in a dmnp on the great magnate's
road. In honor of Norway's independence day he had given
the men mider him a holiday and with them he had come to
town to take part in the celebration and to hear me speak.

Hoffman, Minnesota! This set thoughts whirhng in my
brain. I asked him if that was not near Kensington and
whether he knew a man there by the name of Olaf Ohman,
on whose land a stone with a runic inscription had been found.

"Of course I know Mr. Ohman. He is a neighbor of
mine, and he is my brother-in-law."

He unfolded to me that Olaf Ohman had come from Hel-
singeland in Sweden in 1875 and had settled as a farmer near
the village of Kensington.

Andrew Anderson added, "He is a man in easy circum-
stances. He was educated as a mechanic in Sweden and is
thoroughly skilled in the handling of all kinds of mechanics'
tools. He is not a college-bred man like myself, but he has
always been a great reader. His favorite books are Alexander
von Humboldt's Cosmos and a work in Swedish called the
Gospel of Nature"

At this point I invested in a package of Havanas and
compelled Andrew Anderson to, go with me to the hotel where
I was stopping and on arriving there we went to my room
where I closed the door. I prodded him with all manner of
questions in regard to the rune stone and I found him very
familiar with its history.

In the course of our conversation he gave me an interest-
ing account of a deposed Swedish minister by name Fogel-
blad. This Reverend Mr. Fogelblad was a graduate from the
department of theology in the University of Upsala and for
some years he had ser^^ed as a regular pastor of the national
church in Sweden; but he had grown so dissipated that he

Another View of the Kensington Rune Stone 7

had to be deposed. Having lost his position and standing,
he had emigrated to America and had found his way into
Minnesota, where he visited the various Swedish settlements
as a typical literary tramp, paying for his living at the various
homes where he stopped by giving entertaining and instruc-
tive conversations and writing letters to friends in Sweden
for people who were not themselves handy with the pen. On
these wanderings he came to Hoffman and Kensington and
fairly ingratiated himself with Andrew Anderson and Olaf
Ohman. Both of these men were deeply interested in cultural
topics and the tramp Fogelblad had a large storehouse of
knowledge to draw from. In fact Mr. Fogelblad made An-
drew Anderson's home his headquarters and there he died
about the year 1900. Andrew Anderson reverently closed
Fogelblad's eyes in death and took him to his final resting-
place. I may add that Anderson and Ohman and Fogelblad
had long since abandoned the Lutheran Church and by their
neighbors were classed as liberals in religious matters. The
Reverend Mr. Fogelblad, so Anderson told me, was well
versed in the subject of the Old Norse runes. Anderson, him-
self, had brought with him from Upsala, Fryxell's great his-
torical work which contains a full account of the runes with
facsimiles of the various runic alphabets. He loaned this book
to his brother-in-law, Olaf Ohman, and oftentimes Fogelblad,
Anderson, and Ohman spent the evenings or Sundays to-
gether discussing the runes. Fogelblad and Anderson would
write out long stories with runic characters and then read and
translate what they had written to Ohman. In further evi-
dence of Fogelblad's attainments, I may add that he wrote
an ambitious book called The Age of Learning (Upplysnin-
gens Tidehvarf). It has no important bearing on the subject,
perhaps, but I may add that the three were all very proud to
consider themselves wholly emancipated from the dogmas of
the Church.

8 Rasinus B . Anderson

So we now have here Olaf Ohman, who settled near Ken-
sington in 1875, and on whose farm the notorious rune stone
was found at the root of a young tree in 1898; Andrew An-
derson, who arrived from Sweden and settled there in 1882;
and the Reverend Mr. Fogelblad, who came to Minnesota
about the same time and spent much time at the homes of
Oilman and Anderson. All three were deeply interested in the
runes and had made a pretty thorough study of the subject.
Either Anderson or Fogelblad could prepare an inscription
on paper and the mechanic, Ohman, could readily give the
runes permanency by chiseling them out on a stone.

Mr. Anderson, whom I can best describe as a diamond in
the rough, did not, I must admit, in my long and interesting
conversation with him, confess that either one of the three
had had anything to do with the much advertised Kensington
Rune Stone, but I will add with emphasis that he did give
me several significant winks. When I pressed the question
whether he and Fogelblad had not concocted this runic
inscri23tion hoax, he told me that under no law was a man
expected to incriminate himself and so far as Fogelblad was
concerned, he would be the last man to cast aspersions on the
memory of a departed friend.

The fact that Ohman, Anderson, and Fogelblad were all
three Swedes throws a flood of light on the first two words
of the inscription which begins: "Eight Goths." Considering
the high intelligence of Olaf Ohman and his deep interest in
literature, science, and history, can any of the defenders of
this nme stone explain how he put this wonderful find to such
sordid use as to serve as a stepping-stone to his granary?
Surely he would not be guilty of such vandalism, if he had
the slightest faith in its genuineness as an historical relic.
Would he not rather have given it a place of honor in his
parlor or library?

Andrew Anderson and I parted in the small hours of the
morning with a most cordial handshake and as the very best

Another View of the Kensington Rune Stone 9

of friends. This interview has served to solve in my mind
with entire satisfaction all the mystery surrounding this
much exploited rune stone, which, from whatever point of
view it is considered, is nothing but a poorly devised fraud.

How easy it would be for three cronies in Madison to carve
some words and figures on a slab of stone, then some dark
night bury it under a tree on the eastern shores of Lake
Monona, and finally, after a few years, bring it to the light
of day and claim that it must be a rehc of pre-Columbian
times.

And now, my gentle reader, I leave the matter to you and
ask you to draw your own conclusions in regard to the true
origin of the Kensington Rune Stone. So far as I know
Anderson and Ohman are still living near Kensington. May
I not therefore suggest that anyone sufficiently interested
can make a pilgrimage to their homes and interview them
and so probe this matter further? I have no doubt that the
result would be a complete vindication of the conclusion I
have reached as to the authenticity of this runic inscription.
May I not also suggest that this fake has now been exploited
and written up far more than it deserves and that pen, ink,
paper, and brains may be employed to some better purpose?

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